Silicon Valley Is Yearning
For User-Friendly Microsoft

Many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at some point face a critical question: Do they work with Microsoft Corp. or fight it? Keith Raffel took the former course.

Mr. Raffel, founder of UpShot Corp., used Microsoft technology as the basis for his company's online sales-management service, and just this year introduced a new product tightly linked to Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite of software. In 1999, Microsoft even gave Upshot, based...